


Other Duties As Required

by shai



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Archivist Sasha James, Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), Gen, Set in Season 1, spoilers through season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:55:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25056565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shai/pseuds/shai
Summary: Five candidates, two panel interviews, and a lot of bluffing about her knowledge of information technologies, and she’s pretty sure it was the three minute conversation she had with Elias Bouchard as he'd walked her out of the interview room where the real decision was made.Or: the AU where newly-appointed Head Archivist Sasha James comes home to find a package with an old cassette tape posted through her front door, passing on a warning from a dead woman.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 56





	1. Chapter 1

Five candidates, two panel interviews, and a lot of bluffing about her knowledge of information technologies, and she’s pretty sure it was the three minute conversation she had with Elias Bouchard as he'd walked her out of the interview room where the real decision was made.

“Gertrude mentioned you before her passing, you know,” he'd said, voice light and casual.

“Oh!” Sasha said. She genuinely is surprised, not playing it up to sound modest: she’s always had a wary respect for the Head Archivist. The people who called her a dotty old bat weren't paying nearly enough attention. But she’d never gotten the sense Gertrude saw her anything more than convenient.

Elias smiled. “Indeed. I understand she was impressed by your observational skills and attention to detail.”

Sasha is an accomplished academic. This is a job interview, sure, but only for an internal transfer. She pushes down her curiosity and the fact she’s a little flustered to realise that old battleaxe thought well enough of her to mention it to her boss, and smiles and thanks him in a neutral polite voice.

“May I ask,” he says, “Is there something in particular that brought you to the institute?”

There's something very focused about him in that moment, an aspect of his personality she’s never noticed at staff meetings or his visits to artefact storage. It’s hard to define what exactly: his voice is the same posh business-speak as normal, but she feels for a moment like she has his complete attention. Something in the eyes. It might come across as flirty in another man, but in him it’s just intense in a different way. It throws her; she ends up more honest than she means to be:

“To be honest, it’s partly just that I was interested in how the institute could exist in the first place. I was surprised there was funding for a highly specialised place like this in Chelsea! But, I’m interested in folk life studies and anthropology, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to apply those skills to this field.”

“And since you’re now applying to move internally, it seems our little organisation has managed to keep your attention.”

She nods. “Mm, so many of the researchers here are focused on quantifying what is and is not supernatural any more, questions about the objective facts of an artefact or event. But I think the stories are just as interesting. How all these artefacts came to be considered the way they are, how they came to the Institute, what common threads they share. It’s a unique perspective on anthropology, and such a diverse collection.”

He seems to consider that for a moment, and then smiles. “It truly is. Thank you for your application, Ms. James. I do hope our little institute will offer you keep on offering you… unique perspectives.”

He shakes her hand, then pats her on the shoulder. "We have two more candidates to interview, but we should make the final determination by Friday. We'll be in touch either way."

* * *

There had been one other internal candidate, she’d heard on the grapevine, one Sims from Research. Apparently he’d dropped out. One rumour had it he’d gotten hold of the payscale and not found it enough of a step up, the other that he'd realised not having any archival experience might be a problem. She hopes it’s the former, since she can’t really say any better for herself when it comes to library science or preservation. She had spent a fair few afternoons helping Gertrude out with some of her less conventional tech requests, but those were mostly off the record. It’s hard to see how it’d count for anything.

So she was hopefully, but it’s still a shock to get called into Bouchard's office and be told she's got the job. A £12k raise and three assistants to hire. Tim texts her about drinks and rounds up friends and a bottle of bubbly.

It’s a fun evening, and on the night bus home she has happy tipsy visions of a career of glamour and conferences and a budget of her own. You could say those are boring fantasies, but it's been a long time coming, a job title without ‘Assistant’ or ‘Junior’ in, skipping right past ‘Senior’ to ‘Head’.

When she gets home to her houseshare (she’ll be able to look for somewhere of her own now!), there’s a parcel been posted through the door. No stamp on it or address or postmark, just her first name.

Weird. Surely anyone who'd known she’d put her hat in the ring for the job and cared enough to congratulate her would have just come out for drinks?

She sets it down on the dining room table and gets a glass of water before she opens it, quiet as she can. It's nearly two in the morning, night buses being what they are.

There’s a cassette player with a tape in it, and a letter.

The letter is very short, handwritten on lined paper torn off a notebook, in a scratchy but legible hand. "Passing this on from Gertrude. Be careful! You can't even imagine."

Her shoulders tense up. What can’t she imagine? Gertrude had kept hold of the job for decades, gotten old and died at an advanced age.

For a second she wants to chuck it right in the bin, refuse to give some jealous crank the time of day. But if there’s one thing she’s put money on about Gertrude Robinson, it’d be that that woman had had her secrets.

She takes the cassette and player back to her room, listens. _The first thing you have to do is accept that you are in great danger, and will be for the rest of your life._ Once, twice, a third time.

She goes to sleep with the words rolling around her head uneasily.

* * *

Gertrude (if really it was Gertrude speaking) had invited her to try putting in her resignation to prove a point. Apparently it'd be impossible.

Now, Sasha takes her predecessor seriously enough to get very, very cautious and start looking through the archives for ways to confirm or deny the contents of the letter. Handing in her notice and looking like a flake who doesn't deserve this fancy new title or salary seems like a step too far though. Part of coming to the institute had been because it’d be an easier place to get a senior position than most of the rest of their cramped little field.

In between interviewing assistants and arranging Tim's transfer ("Are you sure about this? Me being your manager, I mean?" / "Where better to find me some clues for what I’m after than in all these lovely dusty rolling stacks, boss?"), she rummages through the cluttered stacks for statements about eyes and does a little bit of not-entirely-above-board digging about the other candidates for Head Archivist.

Some might call it immoral. But if they’re gonna insist on getting her to help them with IT admin and then ignore her when she tells them not to reuse admin passwords across the institute… any resulting data leaks are pretty much self inflicted.

Jonathan Sims had been the other internal candidate who applied. She makes up an excuse to go over to research and catches him for a minute at the coffee machine and asks why he withdrew his application.

He frowns at her. “I’m sorry, I told exactly three people about my application and I don’t believe any of them were you.”

“I’m – look, no offence, I don’t mean to touch a nerve, it’s just.” Sasha pauses. “I’m the one who got the job, and it’s not quite what I expected.”

“Oh my _sincerest_ apologies. Imagine that, working for an institute for paranormal research might not be entirely normal.”

“I’d transferred from Artefact Storage, _thank you_.” Sasha says, even though she shouldn’t rise to the bait. “But okay, fine, I get your point, you want nothing to do with it.”

* * *

It’s not like he owed her honesty or anything, but the tone does wind her up. She spends an afternoon picking random boxes from the shelves and indexing statement dates by the very informal themes that she it probably isn’t very professional to let Tim pick snarky labels for (so far they have “creepy crawlies”, “ghosts and ghouls”, “uh-oh, cursed objects” and “spooky books”). It helps. They’re putting the statements in roughly chronological order, but keeping the new taxonomy of metadata on a little shared spreadsheet in Dropbox where no-one else can see it.

They're sitting out back for a lunch break the next day when he brings it up: "I know now the world’s recognised your true bureaucratic majesty you’re gonna feel like you need even more perfectionist standards to prove them right, but… it's not just that, right? You've been all – on edge."

Heh. Yeah. She’s surprised it’s taken him this long to say anything, honestly. She's been looking around every room for cameras and posters and other 'symbolic representations of eyes' of the kind Gertrude said Elias could look through. She's stuffed all her DVDs and postcards and so on with faces on in an old suitcase under her bed, feeling like an absolute plonker but not wanting to take the risk. What’s the downside of taking precautions, she’s been telling herself; she’d feel like a right idiot if she ignored a warning from beyond the grave and it turned out someone really did murder her forebear.

She sighs, looks around again. No eyes she can see. Unless Tim’s count, but she flips a coin and decides she’s not willing to go down this paranoia spiral all alone even if it is a risk to share.

"What's up, fearless leader?"

"The night I found out I got the job, someone... sent me a warning. Posted a letter and a message Gertrude had recorded through my door at home."

"Huh," Tim says, leaning back against the wall and waiting with a bit of a frown for her to tell the story.

You wouldn't think it to look at him, flippant chatterbox he normally is, but he actually is pretty good at keeping things quiet when he needs to be. She remembers his brother and the circus, and how relieved he'd looked when she'd listened to his story and just nodded.

“It – I’ll be honest, it sounded pretty out there, what was on the tape. I'm still kinda trying to decide how seriously I should take it.

“What she said was... let’s see: that being the Institute’s Head Archivist isn't just a job, it's some kind of – binding supernatural contract. That I wouldn’t be able to quit if I wanted to. She said Elias is pulling strings. She said he can see through anything that's used as a symbol of an eye. The way she talked, it sounded like she had a set of rules in her head for how supernatural entites work, like she really understood what was going on with this kind of thing.

“She kind of started to explain some of it: she said there are entities you can think of as gods, and they can bind people to themselves as minions or agents or something. She said that they represent things humans fear, and that their agents will try to carry out some kind of... ritual, that would end the world, or change it in awful ways.”

“ _Riiiight_. _”_ Tim says, with a little laugh. “Weird. She seemed so stiff, I wouldn’t’ve pegged her as the kind to join the conspiracy wackos seniors’ club.”

She tries to think how to get across the mix of scepticism and caution and worry and fascination she's been carrying with her since she heard the message.

“I don’t think she was. Did you ever really talk to her, one on one? Gertrude was – scary. Sneaky, ruthless, very good at keeping secrets, up for breaking the law if it’d get what she wanted done. I don't know exactly how much of the stuff she said I believe yet, but there's things in artefact storage that’re no joke. And she had fifty odd years to figure it all out.”

It looks like it takes him a moment to realise she’s serious, she’s taking it if not at face value than at least as a real possibility.

“Huh. Well, fuck.” He says. “Hey Sash, sorry to break it to you, your dream job might just be cursed.”

* * *

They start investigating, slowly and carefully. Tim adds “clowns >:(” to the metadata. Sasha painstakingly follows audit trails and Companies House records for the funding of the Institute and finds a lot of private individual donors with interests in the esoteric.

That makes sense, and the ongoing revenue from investments is normal enough, for a place founded back when London property prices were much more modest – but by far the biggest source of income is from the Lukas trust, which is the majority owner of a shipping company and part funder of a space station. As far as she can tell, they’ve got no other investments at all in history or the supernatural. The fund seems to be a few hundred years old and owned by a family of the same name who have never given any interviews or made it onto public record. Pretty weird. She can’t find any contact number to make polite enquiries, though.

Elias drops by and checks in on her, smiling blithely as she apologies for how slow her progress making filing order out of chaos is. She says nothing of consequence; he encourages her to interview some more assistants to help getting ‘the old place in order’. Her hands shake with suppressed tension for the next few hours, but she gets a job spec polished and put up.

They hire one Martin Blackwood, twitchy and good-humoured and so timid she literally has to make an effort not to sneak up on him and startle him.

He makes everyone tea while she reads through more dusty old files, and jumps when she asks how he takes his to take her turn as the bringer of break-times.

He’s eager to help with research, even when the things she and Tim are investigating have gotta seem odd without context.

A few weeks in, she finds a statement about a place called Hither Green Chapel, and what seems like it could be some uncanny ceremony that took place there. It’s odd – she keeps wondering if this could be the kind of ‘ritual’ Gertrude warned her about, but after a month of sifting through so much old paper and so many rambling and indirect personal accounts, it all seems so distant from the dead woman’s warnings. Would it have hurt Gertrude to be just a little more specific?

There’s been no sign of anything spooky come to kill her yet. She has so, so many questions, and so much information, but it’s all so – frustrating subjective. So abstract. Like there’s information here, but she just isn’t managing to get it. She needs to – pull it into focus, somehow.

She and Tim and Martin have been reading through the statements, adding notes on them to the index metadata document, and then filing them in chronological order.

She doesn’t want to put this one back, somehow. She feels like it’s saying something important and she just can’t quite get her head around it.

She switches her laptop on (tapping the taped-over webcam to remind herself the duct tape is still there) and starts to transcribe it to digital. She thinks about summarising it, but that’d introduce her own biases as an observer, so she studiously types up Mark Bilham’s descriptions of his girlfriend’s very odd housemate as she slowly escalates from removing lightbulbs and singing to talking about the end of the world and then vanishing.

She transcribes his horrified description of the church, and as she types it she feels like she’s there, like that tamped-down barely rational panic is flooding through _her_ , like she’s in the darkness and remembering why that’s something that makes humans uneasy. She feels like she understands him.

She doesn’t feel any more like she knows why they’re saying ‘Ny-Ålesund’, a city in Norway as she saves it to a new ‘transcriptions’ folder by statement ID. But ah well, it was interesting to change gears a bit. If she’d realised she needed a break enough to daydream about someone’s long-ago genuine worries she should probably get up and take a tea break.

It’s not until a week later when she wants to cross-reference it against a file about Edwin Burroughs and another twisted ceremony in a church she notices anything odd. The file 0151904.docx is unreadable. The document won’t open, and none of her attempts to repair it or convert it or make sense of the mangled binary file; it isn’t even valid XML.

She tries writing up the first three paragraphs of Father Burrough’s statement in a plain text file, in a couple different document programs. The same issue crops up: they can be saved without error, but never opened again. Even drawing the letters by hand in Paint doesn’t work.

She tries recording her voice or using text to speech. Like with Mark Bilham’s she can make the representation of the file, but she either can’t save it or can’t open it again from a saved state.

She picks a random less-sinister file off the to be read pile and manages to save it and reopen.

Well. It looks as if they’ve found a spookiness barometer. That’ll be useful.

* * *

Martin is jumpy the few times they send him out to do research on site, enough that Tim starts getting snarky about it and Sasha starts having to bite her lip, because teasing about it would come across worse from his boss than a coworker.

Still, Sasha’s been jumpy too since she got the job, so when he texts her at half seven to ask if she’s still at the office while he’s out taking a look at the Vittery house, Sasha’s worried enough to say yes, she was about to head out but she’s happy to wait if he wants to check in.

He shows up half an hour later, just long enough for Sasha to get to the least overpriced curry place in walking distance and back. Clothes rumpled, round face set in a kind of nervous-but-determined mask, but he smiles when he sees her.

“Oi, you,” Sasha says. “I’ve said before, no need to run yourself ragged chasing up leads on cold cases, we’re not on a deadline here.”

“Well, _you’re_ still here,” Martin says. He’s got her there, she hasn’t told him about Gertrude’s warning yet so she’s got no excuse. “But look, that’s not important, something _really_ weird happened when I went back. It’d fit right in with all the rest of this” - with a gesture out from her office door to the stacks.

“So would a lot of things, we’ve got a wide variety of weird in these here archives” Sasha says with a smile. “But OK, I got us curry. Help yourself to under-spiced aloo gobi and talk me through it.”

“Iiii, I’ll pass on food for a bit, thanks. Let me think, how do I explain? How should-? Where do I start?”

“Statement of Martin Blackwood,” Sasha prompts with a bit of a smile, “Regarding his investigations into Carlos Vittery’s former home.”

Martin chuckles. Scratches the back of his neck. Starts talking: he explains how after they’d noted Carlos Vittery’s statement about spiders was one of the ones that couldn’t be recorded digitally, and that it was recent and from nearby enough to be easy to follow up, he’d gone to speak to Vittery’s neighbours. He’d found a worm, and then a basement full of spiderwebs, and then a landlord who hadn’t know about the death.

Sasha’s framing device of ‘pretend you’re a visitor with a story to tell’ works better than she’d expected; his nervous jumping between topics settles down into a nice calm linear prose tale. He explained that all those cobwebs stuck out as weird, like they might be hiding things, and that - “this is kind of embarrassing, but – I really did want to prove myself, and not look like I was scared off by the first dark basement I came across.”

Sasha he starts talking again before she feels awkward enough to want to reassure him so she just nods.

He tells her how sinister the basement felt at night, and how he heard rustling and moved towards it until he could make out a human figure, a woman, coughing up worms.

“I was about to scream, and I would’ve, if there hadn’t been something _else_ in the room with us. It grabbed me – one arm around the chest, the other locking a hand over my mouth, and held me pinned there still for a moment. I flailed around a bit, because, hey, it’s scary when something you can’t see grabs you! I tried to get it with an elbow, but I couldn’t move my arm enough, and it whispered: ‘you don’t want her to wake up’. It was right. I really didn’t.

“And, y’know, I couldn’t see what this other person was like, but but I’d had time now to realise what was going on with that figure on the ground. It was… bad. There was a worm burrowing out through her nose, like, _through_ it, not down the nostrils but _out the side_ , and more worms were crawling outwards over the floor, and I was sure if I tried to fight this person who was holding me she’d wake up and then – well, those worms moved faster than you’d think, and there were a hell of a lot of them. I didn’t fancy my chances. So I just nodded, and the person – he had a male-sounding voice – said ‘so you’ll stay quiet?’, and I nodded again.

“He let go, and there was a little sound from behind me as if he’d picked something up, and then he just – stepped right up to the monster and smashed her – it, maybe, I don’t know – he smashed this _creepy_ _worm_ _person_ upside the head with something heavy. The noise it made was pretty bad, metal hitting her skull. I didn’t dare move the beam of my torch because I didn’t want to blind my new anti-worm ally, even if he had scared the heck out of me. So it was all pretty hard to make out, but I saw her tilting over sideways on the floor and him clubbing her a second time in the head. Then changed his grip on the thing he was holding and I realised he was holding a fire extinguisher, and the worms shrivelled up as he sprayed it around. I realised I could help: I shone the torch around the floor and he sprayed anything that moved down, and after a few minutes of that that felt like an eternity there were shrivelled corpses everywhere and the room was still.

“I asked if we were safe.

“He laughed, just once, kind of bitter. ‘From her? Yes. From the world. Not at all’. I asked who he was, and what he said was... ‘I’ll tell you, but not now. There are tunnels hidden under the archives. Look for them. You can tell Sasha James and anyone she trusts, but don’t draw attention to yourselves; don’t mention this anywhere outside the archives’.

“I just nodded, I felt all caught off guard by some mystery monster hunter knowing who I was. But before I’d really finished processing what’d happened, he patted me on the shoulder and headed off towards the exit. Then the next thing I knew the room felt colder, quieter, darker somehow, and when I looked around I couldn’t see any sign of him. I swung the torch all around the place, even at the horrible bug-eaten corpse…. But he’d vanished. And that made me worry about what if someone found me here with this dead body and murder weapon, so I scrambled back out and away and came back here. And so – I did.”

He takes a deep breath, then shakes his fluffy-haired head.

“Jane Prentiss.” Sasha says, more to fill the silence than to mean anything. “I recognise that name.”

She flips her laptop on, filters the excel table to show only statements tagged with ‘creepy-crawlies’, then pulls up the lists of names and dates for each. “Right, of course, one Jane Prentiss seemed to match Harriet Lee’s attacker, and Harriet Lee went on to, uh, explode into worms at Timothy Hodge after they slept together. Ew. Uh, not to worry you, but are you _sure_ no creepy crawlies got onto you?”

Martin nods vigorously. “Believe me, I checked.”

“Right. Well, I guess we cross our fingers there isn’t another shambling worm-zombie out there and that your mystery friend did this one in. So that just leaves...”

“Him. And these tunnels.”

She nods. “But you’ve had a long enough day already – I want stuffed paratha.”

There’s something weirdly nice about sitting there sharing there processing this new weirdness together, Martin with his hands cupped around a mug of tea, Sasha catching up on her missed lunch in at dinnertime.

It’s not something she’d’ve looked for in a job, this tense camaraderie, but she reckons they’ll be able to figure it out together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon quoted/directly referenced here:  
> * Gertrude's warning to her successor is in MAG 121: https://snarp.github.io/magnus_archives_transcripts/episode/161.html  
> * Martin exploring Carlos Vittery's basement is in MAG 22: https://snarp.github.io/magnus_archives_transcripts/episode/022.html
> 
> When I listened to MAG 161 I got V EXCITED about what woulda happened if Gertrude managed to send her covert handover message, then when I listened to MAG 162 I got all in my feelings about Sasha. By now I'm guessing there might be other fics with the premise "what if archivist Sasha" and "what if that message got through", but please accept this humble contribution to the project of overthinking minor characters.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang make some new friends.

They don’t know what the man who Martin met in Carlos Vittery’s basement looks like, or where to find him outside the scene of the crime, so as follow-up their starting point is trying to figure out who might have wanted to kill Jane Prentiss. Unfortunately, she’d become a horrifying murderous vessel for worms, so the the list of suspects is pretty much just anyone who’s seen the new her.

Very wary of Elias’s eyes, they start in on the other angle: tunnels under the institute. Tim knows some things about how to track down architectural drawings from his brother; Sasha knows how to get into some records office systems.

Two weeks later, they haven’t found anything definitive. Gertrude made it sound like there were a lot of people who would wish her ill or want to manipulate her, and that adds an extra bit of unease to the idea of secret passageways under the Archives for folks to sneak around unseen, of folks following her as she leaves the office after dusk.

She’s always enjoyed people-watching from her building before setting out to face the trials and travails of commuting across London, but now there’s an edge of genuine intent to it at the moment, of a question: _will there_ _be_ _someone watching me_ _back_ _?_

So she notices, one morning, when there’s someone down on the street her building looks out on whose reflection is wrong in the old warped glass: a figure with long blond curls and limbs that look out of proportion with his torso, whose face seems… built wrong.

Is this the person Martin met? Are they here to kill her? To spy? The man who killed Jane Prentiss had been able to hide so well Martin thought it was something supernatural, that he’d vanished into thin air. If that person had wanted to spy on her, she reckons he could do it without her noticing.

The person whose reflection is wrong in the old worn glass is staring directly up at her.

Not subtle enough to be spying, Sasha thinks. That’s someone who either wants to threaten me or talk.

But then she shifts slightly and instead of looking at the figure below through the warped and tinted old pane of glass she’s looking through a clear one, and she just sees a normal fellow human going about some normal business again, not looking anywhere near her.

She tilts her head back: he’s still looking away, but his reflection is warped again.

By the time she’s repeated the trick a couple more times and convinced herself she’s not imagining things and gone down to look for him, she can’t make out a lanky blond any more.

Unsettled, scared but also excited at the idea of finally finding someone else who knows about Gertrude’s world of powers and monsters, she sets off on the Victoria line as normal. She’s almost glad when the subject of her attention either knew her routine already or could keep pace with a tube train across London, but there’s a distinctive figure sat at a table in her favourite coffee shop when she exits her station quarter of an hour later to walk to Chelsea.

The being is sat in a cafe alone. It’s… an invitation, maybe. A table for two, morning coffee with tall blond and monster.

Sasha havers at the idea of being late to work for a minute, then realises that if Gertrude’s right _this_ is her work, the finding out of sinister secrets. She texts Tim and says “late in, chasing a lead”, then makes her way to the counter to orders a coffee and a muffin. She takes the table number over to the blond person sat in a kind of relaxed sprawl at a window table.

They’re looking out through the window, up close entirely normal-seeming, and for a moment she’s convinced she’s going to totally embarrass herself by interrogating a stranger – what’s she going to say, ‘hi, are you in on an ancient supernatural conspiracy, it’s just you looked creepy through my favourite fun-house-mirror window?’ – when they look up directly at her.

“Archivist. Who killed the flesh hive?”

It’s funny: she’d been so wrapped up in wanting external confirmation for it all she hadn’t thought about how terrifying it’d be to actually get it. She’s walked into the spider’s lair without a second thought, and it was a Caf _é_ Nero.

“I – ‘flesh hive’?”

“You know – filth. The worms. And the body that harbours them.”

They grin at her, and she realises their teeth are like shark’s teeth, layers on layers of them in rows. It makes the figure opposite her suddenly seem less gender-ambiguous and more human-ambiguous.

“Seems to me that you have some kind of ally, Archivist, but I couldn’t make out who. Or _what_.”

“I, it’s just Sasha, please.” She thinks fast. “Do you have a name?"

It laughs, an odd sound. “Why would I? I don’t have a _self_ to hold a name close to. Your kind might have a name for me, they always do insist on that tiresome categorising. No room for ambiguity."

“Any decent librarian will tell you categories are for records, not people,” Sasha says with a smile, pretending she isn’t adrift in this conversation. “I'm happy to use whatever name you like best, or no name, whatever you prefer."

"Oh, not a demand, not even a question. You act like you've still got soft edges. So nice, so careful."

There's mockery that verges on real anger in those words, a kind of coiled tension she thinks must be less about her words and more about what makes this creature itself. She’s trying to think how to reply when it keeps talking.

“What is the intent of a name? A dance could be given a name by anyone, but that little word is a poor label, it's _by_ _danc_ _ing_ that you get close to the nature of the thing, by moving through the steps. You can not know what I am with words.”

"I see. Thank you for explaining."

"And do you want to find out more, Archivist? Do you want to walk that path?"

“I – I'm not sure that would go well for me.”

It laughs. Yes, _it_ , she thinks. This being is outside her understanding; if she wants to predict it she needs to start from the assumption it isn’t following any rules or norms or human patterns she knows.

The laughter hurts. The man reading the paper at the next table looks over and shifts his chair as if being on the far side of the table from them would block the laughter out, and the grating of the chair feet against the floor strikes a brutal disharmony to the sound, echoing in her ears louder and louder.

There’s something funny about the fact she’s finally got a chance to find out what another active agent in this hidden world wants and it’s someone she can barely make heads or tails of. She waits until the echoes of eerie laughter die down, then asks her own question.

“If you can't be described except by experience, and names don't mean much to you, why do you call me Archivist when I asked you to call me Sasha?”

It looks a bit surprised, then it cackles, and she thinks it means it this time, the edge of menace its voice had had before that made its laughter seem more like a threat display than a genuine reaction is gone.

"Ooh, a pointed question from this gentle little watcher. And why should I answer?"

She takes a few seconds to decide what to say. It knits is fingers together to steeple them over the top of its mug of black coffee. They are wrong in the reflection of the drink; the texture of cured meat; the nails starting in the middle of the second knuckle. A little bit Picasso, a little bit _Dalí_. And yet neither.

“You… It sounds like you think of people as complicated things who can’t be reduced down to simple words.” Sasha dares. “Someone in the institute more powerful than me is trying to fit my complicated, weird, contextual self into some set role of his own that I don’t understand, into being this thing called an ‘archivist’. That person wants me to walk a path they've already picked out, but what I want is to look what's ahead on that road and choose whether to follow it or not.”

“ _The_ Ar-chi-vist,” it says, sing-song emphasis on each syllable. “It’s not a name, it’s a way of relating to the world. You could even call it a duty, if you wanted to be boring about it.”

Sasha tries to sear the answer into her memory to pick apart later.

“Well. You can see I don’t understand yet. And I don’t trust the institute to give me the information I need to find out. Can you help?”

“Help… What a thing it is you ask, for _me_ to help you with your plots in the house of the Eye. No, I don’t think so. Stability is useful, sometimes, and you seem very – new, to try your luck plotting against your kindred.”

“They’re _not_ my kindred. The institute’s just the only place I could find a research job without leaving London. If it really is some kind of… evil eye temple, I know I don’t want to help their plans!”

For a second there is something complicated in its gaze, something almost soft. It says, quiet: “It is an archive. And you are a piece of it now.”

Sasha laughs, despite herself. Terrified. But also relieved, to meet a monster and for it to tell her she’s not just worrying over nothing. “I... I can't decide if that tells me anything at all.”

“That sounds like your problem.” It stands up, sweeps its huge mass of ringlets back over its shoulder. Sasha’s briefly fascinated by the odd patterns they make in the glass windowpane. “So tell me. Who is your ally?”

“We… really don’t know if he is an ally. We’re not in contact with the person who killed Jane Prentiss, and we don’t know what their motives are. We’re looking for a way to speak to them safely.”

“So.” It sets one hand down on the table, the sound of contact making it seem like something heavier than just flesh. “You sent your assistant Martin Blackwood to face the Corruption undefended?”

Sasha flinches back – there is something harsh like judgment in its voice. A couple at another table look over for a moment in alarm before she shakes her head at them to indicate all is okay. Kind of okay. She does not feel okay that this person knows her colleagues’ names.

“I… no. I didn’t know there would be any corruption there. Anything like that, what did you call it, the ‘flesh hive’. If I’d known we’d’ve gone together, or stayed away.”

It stares at her, flat. She doesn’t understand where this line of questioning came from at all.

“I’m serious. I didn’t know taking this job would put me in danger. Apparently it does, and I don’t want anyone else mixed up in that who doesn’t have to be. If you care about that too, for whatever reasons of your own you have, I’d be happy to have your help. But I’d like to understand - why do you care? What’s at stake for you here?”

“Nothing but my curiosity, little watcher. But – you’re interesting enough. If you really do care about protecting your own, come to Hanwell Cemetery.”

It stands up and leaves through a door she hadn’t noticed at the back of the cafe, its yellow incongruously bright in the by-the-dozen coffee-shop décor.

When did it mean to meet - now, but travel alone? This evening? Tomorrow? She isn’t at all sure, but it said itself it was fickle.

It might be a very bad idea to go with this odd being. It might be a chance to make an ally.

She texts Martin and Tim the name of the cemetery and that she’ll check in in two hours if not sooner and downs her coffee. When she looks up again, she sets off in the wrong direction for the way out, and can’t figure out why.

The creature that has a way of relating to the world but not a name is waiting for her; there’s no indication of how long it’s been there.

It has a plan, and she goes along with it, even though she feels silly and self-conscious sneaking into an abandoned house, laptop bag over her shoulder and wearing one of only two pairs of smart black work trousers she owns.

She kills a thing that used to be Timothy Hodge but had now become nothing but substrate for worms to feed on, and then her companion catches her arm with a hand that feels coarse and heavy and wrong and holds her still.

“Ah – reluctant Archivist, one’s burrowed into you.”

She looks. It’s right. There’s an entry wound in her upper arm.

Sasha feels panic crash through her like a wave: a worm gnawing into her like the flesh of an apple, hollowing her out like Prentiss or Hodge.

“Oh god.”

“I could pluck it out.” The monster she’s followed here says, almost idly. “Or – I could watch and see what happens. It’s an interesting question, isn’t it: can the Archivist be food for such things? And would I enjoy it, watching something else make it _other,_ make it not know itself, make it lose itself.”

Sasha should be terrified, is terrified, but there is something in the undercurrent to its words that catches her.

“That’s my job, though, isn’t it? Yours is something else.”

She can’t bring herself to look away from the hole in her arm, so she doesn’t see its expression when in one swift movement its fingers cut deep into her arm. Just a sharp pain, and then a moment later it is holding a single white worm up, impaled on two fingers that should not be thin enough to spear such a small creature but somehow are.

“Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, _thank you_ ,” Sasha says, breath turning short and panicked.

“Distortion.” It says. “That’s mine. You should better care of yourself. But if you’re willing to stand in danger, maybe I do want to see what you can do under the eye’s notice.”

She doesn’t trust herself not to yell or scream or run away, so she nods.

It lays a hand over her eyes. She shuts them, and a second or two later vertigo hits her, except it’s not the feeling of falling, it’s the sense the white noise, of stars swirling behind her closed eyelids with some inscrutable purpose, is trying to show her something, is a maze or a map or a secret.

She spends a moment breathing deep and focusing on all the other senses than her eyes before she dares open them and see if the world’s changed around her, and when she looks up, she’s alone.

Distortion. Its way of relating to the world to distort it. And if she’s playing Elias’s role, she’s meant to sit back and catalogue it.

She doesn’t feel like she’s doing much of a job of that, right now.

“Tim, you around?”

There’s a rustling, then Tim’s head emerges from the rolling stacks to drawl “aye aye skipper.”

“Let’s go for a drink after work.”

“Aye aye!” he repeats with more gusto.

Martin sees Tim waiting for her to leave, looks between them with the expression of someone wanting to ask where they’re going but worried about finding out he’s not invited.

Sasha feels like a total heel for setting this scene up, and Tim shoots her a pointed look too – like he’ll follow her lead but doesn’t feel great about it.

It’s dangerous to bring him in on the whole mess. But given that creature knew his name, it might be just as dangerous not to.

“We were heading out for a quick drink, if you wanna come along?”

“Find out all our dark overlord’s secrets,” Tim says, waggling eyebrows “She secretly loves trashy happy hour cocktails. She puts _mayo_ on chips.”

“Lies, all lies,” Sasha says, shoving Tim to make the point a little stronger: “Slander!”

But holed up at a place a little bit off the beaten track and vetted for a lack of eye-iconography, she does fill him in – tells both of them about the cemetery and the creature that is a distortion, fills Martin about Gertrude’s message, and then lets Martin describe the excitement with Prentiss.

“Great. Perfect. We’ve got _t_ _wo_ scary people with mysterious powers snooping on the both of us. Or maybe three, if we count, y’know.”

He points at his eyes, like the first half of the ‘I’m keeping an eye on you’ gesture.

“You… you do both realise how crazy this sounds, right?” Martin says. “That you think Elias is _literally evil_ but you’re still working here?”

Tim shrugs. “Apparently she can’t leave.”

“But _you_ can, I bet! If you really buy this why don’t you?”

“Well, you know. Jobhunting sucks, I had enough of it the last time. And what’s he gonna do, write me up ‘cuz he saw me lighting up out back with his spooky voyeur powers?”

“Tim, I’m serious! This is serious. I don’t know what this whole Gertrude vs Elias thing’s about, but those worms could have literally killed me.”

Sasha nods. “Yeah. It is. And if either of you want to move on, I’ll give you a glowing reference. But I tell you, that Salad Fingers-looking mystery man who came to ask after Martin’s mystery helper knew me as ‘the archivist’, and what that person said fitted pretty neatly into what Gertrude said. And if it is… getting out of this might be easier said than done, for me at least.”

“There must be other people who know, if this stuff’s all real. Normal people, not monsters.” Martin says, a determined set to his face. “There _must_.”

“Either that,” Tim says, “Or no-one who comes across something that’s legit spooky comes away in a fit state to tell the tale.”

“Well, they do, they come to the archives about it. Even if the ones who come to us don’t know all the answers, someone must have figured it out. There’s – ghost shows on youtube, podcasts, all sorts, we can ask if they’ve heard of this, this _Eye_ thing.”

“The Eye, It Knows You, The Beholder, The Ceaseless Watcher,” Sasha says, quoting Gertrude’s message. There’s something comforting about using the other woman’s cadence. “The problem is, Gertrude gave us a rough outline, but nothing specific enough for anyone else to confirm or deny – she said these entities are looming over the world and can affect the world by incarnations who take on some of their power, but she didn’t give any examples clearly enough to ask anyone about.”

Sasha takes a swig of her rum and coke and remembers the exact wording. Picks a fight with herself before deciding that yes, she should share with the rest of class.

“Or - no. That’s not quite right. She gave one example, actually.” Sasha takes a deep breath and when she breathes out she recites Gertrude’s words in the dead woman’s dispassionate tone ‘They do not rule our world, but they do exercise considerable power, which they generally manifest in the form of monstrous being that spread further fear – or incarnations, those humans who have willingly, though not always knowingly, chosen to take on the power of those entities. You, unfortunately, have unwittingly made the decision to become one of those incarnations.”

“Wait, Sash, _you_? You’re meant to be something spooky now? To have evil eye powers?”

“Not that I’ve noticed,” Sasha says, sharp. Then she slumps a bit. “But Gertrude said so.”

Martin is quiet for a long time, hands wrapped around the lager Tim had gotten him (“whatever you’re having”) even though he’s barely touched it. Tim notices and raises an eyebrow.

“It was – weird, when Sasha asked me about Prentiss. It felt almost like I was living through it all again, but in this calm distant way. Putting words to all these little details I shouldn’t have remembered, like how things sounded or smelt, like exactly how the lighting looked, and talking about how I felt in the moment even though I’d normally try to – you know, play it down. Sound a bit more professional.”

“Huh. Evil supernatural Q&A powers.” Tim says, wiggling his fingers. “I’m gonna be honest, Sash, unless you’re planning to take over the world from the HR department, turning invisible seems like a way better perk.”

“I don’t even think I can make people answer things. When I asked our mystery cafe creature a couple different questions earlier and it just ignored me and left.”

“Well, try! Ask me a question!” Tim demands, grinning.

“No! Actually, wait, yes, but it’s just ‘can you get me another drink?’”

A couple days later Elias swings by to say he’s heard she was in an altercation and ask her about her wounds: is she ok, and then: does she want to hire another assistant, he can help find someone.

She hadn’t mentioned the injury to anyone except Tim or Martin, who she’s pretty sure wouldn’t clue Elias in. The cut on her arm isn’t even visible under her cardigan. Is what he’s talking about that he can’t spy on her any more, that whatever the distortion-being did worked?

She tries her best not to think anything incriminating and thanks him for his concern - “but it was just a little misunderstanding, nothing to worry about”.

He drops it, tells her he’s proud of the progress she’s made and sweeps back away out of the archives.

She can’t tell if they’ve got one up on him or not, but she doesn’t think they’ve got any way to find out, so they’ll just have to keep going.

The architectural plans of the records of the building have no evidence of any tunnels, but Martin points out there wouldn’t be any point in having a secret underground tunnel maze if you put it on the plans, and he’s got her there. Tim grins at him, proud he’s opening up enough to be flip around the two of them.

Under the pretext of deep cleaning they shift around the furniture and knock on walls, and eventually notice a hollow sound behind the bookcase of reference texts in Sasha’s office.

They wait til seven in the evening, Tim tapping away on his phone, Martin writing in a notebook he snaps shut whenever anyone passes by, and Sasha flicking through a pile of files for mention of people with warped reflections and unclear motives. She’s not too sure about their chances against an invisible person happy to pick a fight with a worm monster, even three on one.

Still. It’s better odds than she’d have without Martin and Tim, that’s for sure.

Sasha straightens the files up together and sets them down on her desk with a chunk. Martin looks up.

“Thanks.”

“For what, boss?”

“Sticking with me. When we don’t know what we’ll find.”

“Ah well, y’know,” Tim says, winking. “You bought me chips the other day. That’ll earn ya one sneaky underground rendezvous.”

She bops him on the back of his head with the notebook. “Don’t sell yourself short, Stoker, at least ask for a coke too.”

“A beer. Once we get back above ground.”

She nods, and Tim turns to Martin.

“And honestly you don’t need to come along, Martin, I know you’ve got working self-preservation instincts still.”

“I do. I need to know who that man was.”

“Do you, though?” Tim offers. “You could always just chill out and keep watch out here?”

“Yes!” Martin says. “You don’t need to patronise me. I know I’m not always the most – confident, and I that I’m new here and not in on all your secrets, but, he told me to come. So I will.”

“So you will.” Sasha agrees. “And well, okay, I think we’re good on time. Everyone got their torches? I’ve got spare batteries.”

The tunnels are dark and very twisty, neat laid brickwork that you can walk over with stable footing but all very narrow. Martin marks each turn with yellow chalk on the left wall, but Sasha can’t help but feel like they’re veering off course, like the tunnels might be writhing and twisting behind them.

They walk and the air gets cooler and cooler, until eventually they hear a quiet sound of footsteps coming the other way and they all three freeze.

A door opens: thin sheet metal, like the service hatches off the underground tunnels. And out emerges the face of – a pretty goddamn good likeness of Martin Blackwood.

His hair is a bit too long, his left eyebrow is broken by a scar, his face is a little more lined, and there’s bags under his eyes. None of that hides the way the underlying shape of their faces is a perfect match.

“You made it!” He says, and the voice is right too. “Come in; it’s not much, but make yourselves at home.”

There is total silence for a second, and then it’s broken by the sound of the chalk Martin was holding dropping from his slack hand to the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon quoted/directly referenced here:  
> * Sasha's meeting with Michael in MAG 26 https://snarp.github.io/magnus_archives_transcripts/episode/026.html  
> * Gertrude's warning to her successor in MAG 121: https://snarp.github.io/magnus_archives_transcripts/episode/161.html
> 
> This fic's Sasha is hungrier for info than canon Sasha was meeting our friend Yaoihands McDoors, but also quicker to take 'I don't have a name' at face value.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang settles down with some tea to talk this all out. Elias is a bad boss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has some more graphic descriptions of violence than the rest of the fic. I've put details in the end notes for anyone who'd appreciate a content warning; click the AO3 'more notes' link to jump down and read those.

What do you say, confronted by your friend’s unexpected apparent identical twin?

Sasha doesn’t know, but the silence gets awkward, so she shrugs and embraces cliché just so they can all move beyond the part of the conversation full of blankly staring at one another: "Not to state the obvious, but… you look familiar."

"And you don’t. It's good to meet you, Sasha James."

"What the shit is going on here?” Tim demands. “Are you Martin's evil twin? How did you know how to kill Prentiss?"

His face is neutral, maybe slightly tired; no trace of Martin’s habitual slight smile. He’s tall and bulky, and at first glance she thinks he’s taller than Martin, but when she looks closer it might just be that he doesn’t stand so curled in on himself. He’s chewing his lip, eyes looking between the two of them, looking uncertain in a deeply Martin-y way.

“No.” Their own Martin Blackwood says with some force: “I'm an only child.”

“Same.” The other man says, with an easy smile. “Come in. I don’t mean you any harm, and this story’s long enough it’d be easier to tell over a cuppa.”

He sets water to boil on a little Trangier stove and makes a cup for Tim and Martin; the first black, the second milk and two sugars. It’s clear the ritual comforts him; something in his eyes goes soft and fond. Then he blinks at Sasha and asks how she takes hers, ignoring how disconcerted the other two are to be given drinks to their preference.

“Are you a _time traveller_?” Tim blurts out. “Did you get traumatised by the spooky worm lady and come back to save yourself?”

The alleged future Martin hands Sasha her tea, then pours himself a mugful and adds milk and two sugars, just the same as Martin would.

“Well, it wasn’t because of Prentiss,” he says with a shrug, calmer than Sasha could imagine Martin being at the centre of so much curiosity. Not totally calm, she suspects, he’s trying to look composed but his fingers are clenched tight around the thin metal camping gear he’s drinking from.

“But that’s the gist of it, give or take a couple catastrophes. How much do you three know yet?”

“Why should we tell you?” Their Martin demands, gesturing suspiciously with his battered tin teacup at the mirror of himself.

“Well, ‘cause I came back from the literal end of the world to save you. It’d be rude not to at least hear me out.”

“Hey boss,” Tim says, giving her a glance “weave your weird spell, ask him. I bet then he wouldn’t be able to lie.”

Sasha steps on his toes, mutters “We still don’t know that’s how it works.”

“It’s gotta be! It wouldn’t make much sense to give someone magic story-prompting powers if the person you ask could just fob you off by just making up some bullshit, right?”

“It doesn’t make any sense for Elias to be some kind of spooky all-seeing supervillain, either, and yet!”

The Martin lookalike has this odd look on his face listening to them, all wistful, and it’s that more than anything else that makes Sasha think – oh, he means it, the literal end of the world.

“Tim’s right,” he says, when their own Martin coughs meaningfully and the two of them stop bickering. “Someone you’ve compelled can’t lie to you. But it’s only been what, four or five months, so I’m not sure you’d be able to do it to anyone who doesn’t already want to tell you their story.”

He starts telling his story without her asking. It’s pretty hard to make sense of, to be honest. All full of names of monsters and fear-gods and rituals and less-than-totally-human people whose names they’ve come across a few of in passing in statements. It seems like he forgets half way through telling it that the logic of the powers he’s talking about isn’t something everyone knows. But they get the general idea: Elias isn’t really Elias, and he wants his Archivist to be ‘marked’ by each of fourteen fears, and in this Martin’s world that happened and doomed everything.

And this future Martin has come back to try and kill Jonah’s original body before that could happen.

“Annabelle Cane set it up, the way to send me back, so you know, we can’t trust her intentions. The Web and all. But – it’s not as if things could have got any _worse_ , it was the _literal end of the world_. And at least here and now Jon’s out of it, and… that’s something.”

He takes a deep breath, frowning down at his tea.

“I’ve not dared to talk to this timeline’s Jon again, after calling him up and, uh, convincing him not to take the job. It’s better that way. Safer. And it seems like it’s _worki_ _ng_ : I stopped Prentiss, and we can stop the ritual.”

“You sent me that tape with Gertrude’s warning on, didn’t you?” Sasha asks.

He nods.

“What was it that killed her?”

“Elias. Or Jonah, really, I suppose.”

It’s not like she hadn’t guessed that. But it’s pretty different to hear it said.

“So, let’s check I’ve got this straight.” Sasha says. “I wasn’t Elias’s first option for the Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, and if he’d gotten his pick he’d’ve started the apocalypse.”

“ _Jonah_ would have. Not Jon. Jon was just – convenient,” the older Martin says, “We didn’t find out what was going on enough quick enough to stop it, and, well, Beholding. Desperately running around asking questions is pretty much exactly what it looks for in an avatar.”

Sasha touches the cut still healing on her upper arm, wondering if she’s ‘marked’ and spiritually contaminated the way Martin is talking about. Surely not. It had been upsetting for a moment, but she’s fine now.

“I’m surprised you can compel people already, though.” he asks. “I’m not sure Jon could, in our timeline. I think it was a year or two.”

Sasha remembers her own Martin giving her a cautious look when they talked about it in the pub, talking suprisingly precisely through finding Prentiss’s body and his future self, when normally he’d weave haphazardly between events and feelings and emotions,

“I’m not sure I’d know how to if I tried, but Martin said something I did let him… explain things more easily, when I’d asked.”

“Anyway,” Tim speaks up. “More important question: how do _you_ turn invisible and do murders?”

“I mean, Prentiss trapped me in my flat for two weeks with no food once, the murder bit was mostly just not wanting to go through that again. The invisible bit...”

He sets his cup of tea down and stands up, then kind of focuses off on the middle distance, and takes a step away from them.

It’s not that there’s a single moment where he vanishes from view, but Sasha blinks and loses track of him. It’s almost a trick of the memory, more than sight: she was sure someone else was in the room a second ago but now she can’t place who or where.

He reappears, sitting back down and cradling his tea between his hands as if needing its warmth. “It’s – the Lonely. Isolation. If you believe you’re so insignificant nobody else will ever notice you, you can be! Isn’t that just great.”

“So you’re in league with one of those _things_.” Martin says, very cautiously.

“That’s not really how they work, to be honest. They don’t care about humans enough to make plans about us, all the plans are humans running around making things up themselves. It’s more that I’m broken in the ways that feed it. It _hurt_ , leaving Jon to come here; it’s lonely hiding down here with barely anyone to talk to, and I keep having nightmares that this place is just a dream and I’ll wake back up back _there_ any moment… all of that draws enough of whatever instinctive _attention_ these entities have that I can use it a bit. Warp the world around me.” He shakes his head, then turns chipper. “Might as well get something useful out of it. Still, I almost wish Helen was still down here. Or is it Michael still for you?”

They collectively frown at him.

“Fingers too long? Spirals? Corridors?” Martin prompts.

“I think so. A person with blond hair and a laugh that echoes longer than it should?” Sasha offers.

“Michael, then. I wonder if he’d help… Well, that’s not the point. The point is, we’ve got a second chance. Elias – _Jonah_ – can’t see me here, the tunnels are hidden from him. I can try to find the Panopticon. And if I can, we can stop him for good.”

The Martin who came back from after the apocalypse doesn’t have a solid plan yet. He’s looking for ‘an ally, more or less’ he doesn’t want to name who’s apparently living somewhere in the tunnels. Not reassuring, that the tunnels are big enough two different people can hide out down there at once.

He asks them to dig out a couple of statements about specifics and to send ‘Michael’ his way if she sees him again. That’s how he knows the creature with the sharp fingers, who said to Sasha it didn’t have a name. She can’t see it, herself. Distortion is a strange label, but it feels more fitting.

She ends up feeling impatient, wanting to research more openly but not wanting to show her hand.

So they’re waiting, more or less. The group had agreed to meet in the tunnels again in a week to check in on his plans, and as days pass that feels less and less clear-cut, until she almost feels like she imagined the whole thing. She keeps wanting to ask Tim, but she doesn’t want to say anything about it where Elias might be listening.

Often when she reads statements they feel _real_ to her, almost like her own memories, full of details and emotional weight and significance. What is supernatural in them grows out from some familiar detail or worry or fear, is anchored in the everyday world even when it becomes outlandish.

Martin’s apocalypse isn’t tethered to the world she knows like that. Maybe that’s part of what makes it seem so distant: there’s nothing in it she recognises.

She’s in her head about it all week, and she walks the last leg of her commute on Friday pretty much on autopilot. If Elias really can see through anything that serves to look at people, she shouldn’t feel any more relaxed on a bus with a CCTV system than in the archives, but fear doesn’t really make sense so she does. There’s other people here. There’s everyday life to escape into. Even in the enclosed space of a moving vehicle where she hasn’t got anywhere to run, it feels like she can blend in.

She gets off the bus, buttons up her coat against the chill spring day, and enjoys the walk home in the dark. She still hasn’t moved house yet; she keeps wanting to, but work’s been so… Well. Itself.

The door’s half ajar. Not as big a deal as it would be outside the block of flats, but still, things go missing sometimes if you leave them out in the corridor here.

As she gets closer, she sees what looks like a charred handprint curled around the edge of the door hanging open. The lock mechanism is on the ground; the wood splintered. Someone has broken in.

Sasha takes two steps back. She’d come up the elevator, she thinks it might be an idea to leave right now, maybe to take the stairs so she knows she’s alone. She’s turned and taken two light-footed steps away when she hears her own front door creak further open.

She looks back, sees a short, stocky woman, brown-skinned and smiling, short hair cropped in a way that reads pretty queer. Wearing a tank top and military-style trousers and boots, bare arms muscular. She’s smiling, wide but genuine, making her eyes light up. Not an expression you’d expect in a burglar.

She’s also advancing on Sasha, with a kind of languid predatory gait that makes running seem like a very bad plan.

Sasha turns to face her square on: “What brings you to my door, stranger?”

“ _Stranger?_ ” the intruder asks, almost jeering – rolls the word around in her mouth with some apparent scorn. “Shows what you know! When I heard ole Gertrude popped her clogs, I wondered who’d be coming to try them on for size. Not sure they’re gonna be a good fit for you at all.”

“Gertrude?” Sasha says, mind racing. How does this person know Gertrude? Is she a deeply alarming friend, or an overly talkative enemy? “What _would_ make me look like a good successor?”

“Oh, you can _ask_ , that’s almost all you can do. Nothing to say I’ll answer.”

“I guess you’ve got me on that,” Sasha says. Then takes a page out of Martin’s book and goes for de-escalating with “Would you like a cup of tea?”

The intruder looks actively confused at that, like Sasha’s wandered off script. But Sasha’s tired, carrying too many books in a satchel that’s cutting into one shoulder, and fed up of uncertainty. Talking to the last monster stalking her didn’t go too badly, except that one moment where it really could’ve.

Giving the other woman plenty of room, she heads past into the living room, and finds the kitchen table in disarray, the neat pile of letters normally bookended between the fruit bowl and the wall scattered around the table and floor. There’s scorch marks on the spine of the China Mieville novel she’d been reading at breakfast.

A shiver goes down Sasha’s spine. Confront this behaviour? Ignore it? Neither seems safe. She doesn’t want to meet the vandal’s eyes but she also doesn’t want to keep her back to her, so she makes herself breathe deep and sticks to routine and hangs her coat and bag up, then fills the kettle enough for two and puts it on, takes two mugs down. There are sounds behind her; footsteps, a chair scraping back, the rustle of paper.

“How’d you take it?”

A snort. Sasha turns, and gets a shrug.

She makes two teas the way she likes and brings them over to a table. The non-answer is a game. She’s being toyed with. She can see that much, the hard thing is that she doesn’t know why, what this person’s motives are.

“So.” She says, summoning cheer into her voice the way she would if she was running a meeting, setting tea on the battered countertop and taking the seat diagonal to her unwanted guest. “You’ve come, you’ve … investigated, it looks like, and you’ve found me wanting. What’s next?”

“Bouchard reckons you’re hiding something. Thinks you know more than you’re letting on, though I can’t say I see it. Wanted me to ask the questions, which is pretty fucking funny coming from him. So. How much do you know?”

_Certainly, the longer he is ignorant of how much you know, the better,_ Gertrude’s dry voice says in the back of her mind.  She’s  very  glad she smashed th at tape  to nothi ng  and burned the note .

“If Elias wants to know what I know, he’s very welcome to ask in person.”

“Oh, I don’t know that you want that, little idiot. Hard to lie to a servant of… Well, of _what_ , little watcher? That’s what I’d like to hear from you.”

This woman seems volatile. Staying quiet seems bad. Lying seems risky. Sasha sips her tea to give herself a minute to think. It’s far too hot, even the tiny mouthful she took scalds her mouth.

“Pretty odd behaviour, for my manager to send someone to break into my home. I’d be happy to cooperate with him, of course, but I’m not sure why I should take it on faith you’re working for him.”

She laughs. “Me, work for that little sneak? Nah. This is a favour. He did me a solid. Suits me well enough to repay it by doing something I find funny anyway.”

“Breaking and entering?” Sasha asks, keeping her voice steadier than she’d’ve thought she could: “Or catching someone off guard and scaring them into cooperating?”

The other woman folds her hands around her own cup. Steam rises from it, then a shimmering heat haze distorts the air and the tea starts to bubble and boil in the cup. She grins like a cat and leans forward through the water vapour and lifts a hand up towards Sasha’s face.

“Well done,” Sasha says drily. “You’ve done it, you’ve scared me, if that’s what you’re aiming for. Congrats, you made the same impact on me as a bad dream or a horror movie! I fell into some kind of panic-alarm-adrenaline mode just from seeing the door open, us humans are like this, we feel threatened when our private space gets encroached on.”

“But here’s something I’m wondering: Elias was playing nice with me, when last we spoke. If he’s really sending some kind of fire burglar after me that’s a pretty sudden escalation. Did he want you to tell me he sent you?”

There’s a silence for a moment. Sasha drinks another sip of tea. The woman Elias supposedly sent stays close and menacing for a couple long beats of silence until it’s clear that’s all Sasha’s got to say on the matter, then leans back in her chair and laughs.

“Heh. You’ve got some bite to you at least. Less of a poker face than Gertrude, but the same bullshit.” Her guest stands up, grins like a shark. “Jude Perry.”

She offers a hand to shake.

Sasha looks at the hand, then down at the steam still rising from Perry’s tea. Does not reach back out. “Sasha James. Thanks for being at least accidentally helpful, even if you did burn a bunch of my housemate’s paperwork.”

“Helpful, am I. You haven’t been yet, so let’s get to it.” Jude says, standing stepping around the table and advancing until Sasha backs up into the wall. “What do you think I am? You’re worried I’ll burn you. But you sure don’t seem all that surprised to think a person could crack your good china without a heat source.”

She reaches out, one hand to Sasha’s face. Even a good couple inches away, the heat radiating from her flesh is painfully intense, like standing in front of a furnace. Sasha swallows. Feels sweat beading on her forehead and her breathing choke up with panic.

Give enough away that she thinks you’re complying, Sasha decides. She doesn’t want to be sat down any more. She stands up, backs away, realises there’s either Jude or furniture between her and every exit.

“You’re… there was a statement about a man who worshipped the lightless flame. ‘Asag’. His flesh was hot enough to burn but it didn’t burn himself. You’re something like him.”

“I am, am I?” Jude stands on her tiptoes to stare challenge into Sasha’s eyes, her lips drawn back in an unvoiced snarl, dark eyes intent, intense, focused. “I think you know more than that, friend.”

Sasha shakes her head.

Jude lowers her hand away from Sasha’s cheek, then unhurriedly presses her hand to Sasha’s collarbone through her polyester cardigan. It takes a moment for the heat to register, then a moment longer for the sensation to sink in and become pain. Sasha screams, knees the shorter woman in the crotch, reaches out to try and pull her hand away then flinches back when her fingertips blister on contact.

Jude doesn’t react at all to a knee to her privates, just shakes her head, hand still searing pain into Sasha. The fibres of her cheap layered clothes are melting, running together under contact with Jude’s flesh. Sasha can’t see her skin. She’s viscerally terrified that her flesh might have melted down to the bone.

“You sure?” Jude says. Then she takes a very deliberate step back. “You don’t know _anything_ else?”

Sasha sinks down the wall, through no conscious choice of her own.

“I thought you… liked me.”

“You seem fun!” Jude says, dropping to her haunches in front of Sasha. “But like I said, I owe Elias a favour.”

There are tears in Sasha’s eyes. Jude’s expression is a little blurred by them, but it doesn’t look like it’s changed from its bright smile. That’s worse, somehow, than if she’d looked malicious.

“That, that thing, your Lightless Flame, it’s some kind of terrible thing outside our world. Powered by – pain. My pain, right now, I guess… am I good fuel for its fucked up fire?”

She wants to see her own wounds, those five points of radiating pain and heat where Jude’s fingertips touched. She knows burns are worse the longer you go before treating them. If they’re bad enough, isn’t there some medical advice about how putting water on them stops being a good idea, starts sending you into shock?

“You’re some kind of – acolyte for it. It gives you power.”

Is that enough to say? She thinks for a second for, teetering between lies and truths, landing on half-truth.

“I think Elias is one of those too.”

Jude watches her for what feels like a long time then pats her on the head, feather-lightly, Sasha’s natural hair frizzing into ash. Very softly, she says: “Not pain, sweetie. Fear.”

She stands and walks out and leaves the front door open.

Sasha’s hands are coming up in blisters already. She fumbles getting her phone out her pocket and finding Tim in her contacts. Calling and holding the handset long enough to make him understand to come over and that she’s burned feels like an eternity.

NHS 111 tell them to take her her to A&E, where they give her the kind of painkillers that make you loopy and tweeze melted plastic out of her skin. They ask a lot of questions. Tim (bless him for rolling with this with no coherent explanation) talks for her, saying he’d been coming over for dinner and found her unconscious and burned and her flat vandalised.

They warn that it will likely scar. She stays in overnight, wakes up hurting so bad she’s convinced Jude found out she was lying and has come back to hurt her again. She finds Martin (the normal one) has come by with iced coffee and cake. He’s very wide-eyed. She’s very sure there’s at least one way for Elias to see this place, so she barely answers his questions and lets him believe it’s the painkillers making her reticent.

A couple hours later, Elias strolls in holding a bouquet of truly tacky flowers and a file. He offers them out towards her, even though her bandaged hands are lying on the bed in full view.

Sasha stares.

“I wanted to stop offer my commiserations in person, Sasha. How distressing, to be attacked in your own home!”

Sasha can be many different people, as the situation demands: articulate and mannerly interviewee, cheery upbeat friend, maybe even a quick-witted adversary when she needs to be. Right now, in pain, faced with Elias barefacedly offering sympathies for an attack he called down on her, she can’t decide which to be. The goal is to hide enough of what she knows about that situation from him that he thinks that’s all she’s hiding, but it’s like sitting an exam without any clue about the mark scheme.

She doesn’t know  enough about  how he works.

He sets the flowers on the side table, pulls up one of the hard-backed visitors chairs next to her.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to trouble you with my presence for too long, but I wanted to let you know we won’t expect you in the office for a week. I’ll stop by and check on your little corner of the Institute for you, you… take some time to process. No need to give me any evidence, we’ll waive the normal sick leave documentation under the circumstances.”

“Jude Perry.” Sasha says. “Do you know the name?”

“Ah,” Elias says. “Your attacker? Good work, to learn a name under duress.”

“She mentioned yours, too.” Sasha says, heart racing with her own daring.

Elias’s tone goes from affable to a more focused interest, smiling but clearly deliberate in his choice of words. “I see. I’d be interested to learn what that means to you.”

“It means I’d like to understand my contract a little better.” (she doesn’t want to give up playing ignorant, but maybe she can keep that and still push a bit for answers.) “What exactly are the _other duties as required_ for the Head Archivist of this institute?”

He actually grins, the cat that’s got the cream, a mastermind who sees another piece in his plan click into place. She can’t think why he’d be hoping for that exact question but she doubts she’d want to know.

“Well, dear Archivist, you said part of what drew you to this job was the chance to explore new perspectives. That’s very much what’s at play here – forgive me for not being more direct about it, but for now, the best thing you can do is simply know that there is more going on in the world than most of us are capable of imagining, and this… altercation… was part of that bigger picture.”

“I’m sorry. Saying ‘you’re just one little pawn on a chessboard’ doesn’t actually answer the question of why a pyromaniac sadist broke into my house on your bidding.”

“ _My_ bidding?” Elias’s eyes narrow. “What exactly did Ms. Perry say to you?”

“That you wanted to know what I knew. Here’s an idea, if that’s true, why not just ask me?”

“Hmph.” He comes across genuinely upset. “What a claim to make. In all honesty, dear archivist, I had come across some worrying information about dangerous people being seen in your neighbourhood, and some of my usual channels for gathering information had, ah, not been available to me recently. But I certainly didn’t realise Ms. Perry would be so impulsive as to harm you.”

“Anyway. Let me leave you to your recovery. I promise, I will ensure you do not need to cross her path again.”

He stands up, and heads out. It takes a good ten minutes of turning over the conversation in her mind and steaming about the fact he didn’t apologise to realise he’s left the file he was holding on the stand by her bed.

She picks it up, clumsy with bandaged hands. She can’t believe anyone as smug as that accidentally left his own notes with her, so this is some kind of a trap, but maybe she’ll be able to learn something from reading it anyway:

_Statement of Jack Barnabas, regarding a short-lived courtship with Agnes Montague in the autumn of 2006..._

The really messed up thing is, she misses the place while she’s out on sick leave. Misses the archives, indexing statements by theme, Martin and Tim’s low key growing friendship, immersing herself in the neatly preserved moments of someone else’s life that each statement captures. She finds herself reading all the statements in Elias’s file over the next few days; they catch her attention in a way books and TV aren’t managing at the moment, filling in little pieces of the puzzles she’s turning over in her mind.

Sasha kind of wonders if she should go AWOL and hide with the person she’s started thinking about as Martin Senior, down in the tunnels. But then Elias would come looking and that might give the game away early.

They meet down in the tunnels two days before she’s due to come back to work.

Martin’s somehow found Jurgen Leitner, a person Sasha only knows as ‘that arrogant prick with his cursed books’ but who Martin Sr swears can help guide them to Jonah Magnus’s original body.

“Ha! You do remind me of her,” he says, all garrulous, more like a barman than a fugitive. “You have a hard look in your eyes, like even when you smile you’ll still be passing judgement.”

“Maybe that’s just when I look at you,” Sasha says, voice tight. “Gertrude asked you to help her too, didn’t she? You were there just before she died.”

She knows he was. She doesn’t like or trust him.

Even if he hadn’t done what he had with the library, she admits, she doesn’t like that he’s got something to compare her to.

She’s always pictured her self as a thing that changes from place to place, group to group, moment to moment. The weight of being the Magnus Institute’s chosen Archivist feels like a pin through psyche, holding her into place in a fixed role she can’t slide away from by side-stepping from one corner of her life to another.

The archivist Elias wants her to be is a thing set in stone, following a known role. The archivist Gertrude was is a reference point Jurgen Leitner will measure her against, rightly or wrongly. Every plan they make from now on is set against the knowledge of Martin’s Archivist, who destroyed the world, whose individual agency couldn’t stop him playing his role.

She’s been fighting against the anonymity of being another smart hopeful minority competing for academia for a decade now. Seems unjust that she got out of it straight into the jaws of a disaster designed to make her notice just how much she’d enjoyed being able to change masks from friend to perfect employee to boss and back.

Suck it up, Sasha. At least you got a warning before you got in too deep, not like Martin’s Jon.

They make a plan. It’s not a good one, but hopefully it’ll have the element of surprise: she and their timeline’s own Martin will stay in the archive and be ready to be a distraction, her keeping Elias occupied and Martin guarding the entrance to the archives and ready to set off the fire alarm and otherwise cause mayhem if neede. Meanwhile Leitner, future Martin and Tim would venture down to the depths to the Panopticon Jonah Magnus’s original body is – Martin Sr assures them – staring eternally eyelessly out from.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings in this chapter for:  
> * Jude Perry breaking into Sasha's home, generally being canon-typical levels of cheerfully sadistic, and burning her badly enough she needs to go to A&E  
> * Elias getting up to some gaslighting bullshit about whether or not he sent Jude to interrogate Sasha, whose mind he can no longer read.
> 
> If you'd like to skip this, stop reading at "The door’s half ajar". There aren't any plot-critical details there that you wouldn't be able to infer from elsewhere.
> 
> Nothing here is directly quoting or adapting canon events, but I was going to write a much less horrifying Jude Perry until I listened to her original statement ([MAG 89](https://snarp.github.io/magnus_archives_transcripts/episode/089.html)) to get a better sense for her voice and remembered just how terrible a person she is.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They have a plan. It’s not what you might call a good plan, but maybe there isn't always a good plan to be had, when it comes to murdering your quasi-omniscient evil boss.

They have a plan. It’s not what you might call a good plan, but maybe there isn't always a good plan to be had, when it comes to murdering your quasi-omniscient evil boss.

Her second day back, Sasha asks for a meeting with Elias, saying she’s got more questions about the Lightless Flame and that she’s found reference to Agnes Montague elsewhere; she wasn’t sure if Elias meant to leave that document with her but she’d found it an interesting puzzle…

He accepts – she’s to come by at one. She’s sure he knows she isn’t being upfront about why she wants to meet. She’s gotta hope it figures she wants to browbeat him about Jude Perry.

She passes the time on to Tim and Martin, and they head down to make their own arrangements. She waits nervously until the time comes to knock at the door to Elias’s office.

He’s not alone, is the thing. There’s a black woman with white-blonde hair and a denim jacket covered in patches, her dozens of bangles and hoop earrings and general air of shabby chic at glorious odds with Elias’s austere office of oak furnishings and neat bookshelves.

“Sasha, welcome, have you met Annabelle? Annabelle, allow me to introduce my new archivist.”

Sasha lingers at the door for a minute longer than she means to. She’s not dressed to intimidate but something in the other woman’s way of holding herself speaks of total confidence; it’s a different vibe to Jude Perry’s air of leashed strength but it feels just as as dangerous.

But Sasha’s job here is just to be a distraction. She can do that, whether there’s one person or two to distract. So she comes in, says “pleased to meet you”, sits down, wonders how close to Jonah Magnus’s body the tunnels team will be able to get before things turn bad up here. They shouldn’t need too long to do the deed.

“I was just telling Annabelle how much I’m enjoying having a new challenge to face down. You see, Gertrude and I were at rather an impasse for many years – she didn’t know my end goal, but as it turned out, she didn’t _need_ to know to be fairly effective at stopping me from furthering it. That’s one risk. Her last few predecessors were on the other extreme: such rash, impulsive creatures that they got themselves in over their own heads before they could be either an asset or a risk to me.”

He shakes his head a little, as if pitying. “Ah well! There can always be another chance, so long as you put the effort in to create one.”

It feels a lot like he’s telling her all this because he means to kill her.

“But you, Sasha – you I find mysterious. As far as I could tell you had no exposure whatsoever to the truths of the world before joining our institute, and you did not appear to be hiding your motives from me when you applied for the job. But it seems to me that since taking it you have found access to some source of information I can’t pin down.”

He’s behind his desk. Annabelle’s leaning against the wall. She’s a tall woman; the tight dark long-sleeved top under her oversized jacket gives this odd impression that her arms are too thin and too long. There’s a pin on her collar of a cartoon spider and a series of neat webs stitched out from it.

Annabelle Cain, Sasha realises. The one who sent Martin back.

“Mr. Bouchard,” Sasha says stiffly. “Are you making a complaint about my conduct?”

She wishes she’d refused to sit.

“Oh, not at all. This is just a conversation between friends. Call it a personal failing of mine, I like to understand people, and at the moment, I feel like there’s something I don’t understand about you. So I hoped we could come to an understanding here today to… smooth over our working relationship.”

“Right. And her?” Sasha asks, indicating Annabelle.

“Ha,” he looks over at Annabelle, “Why not ask her yourself. It’s odd of her to venture out onto someone else’s territory in person like this, but was waiting here in my office when I came back from my coffee break.”

Annabelle smiles, slow and contented.

It feels like a trap. Sasha says: “I’d be very curious what brought you here, if you’d like to tell me.”

“I see. Well, a little birdie told me something interesting might happen in the archives today, and I thought I’d drop by and see.”

“Something _interesting_.” Elias says, voice clipped. He stands. “I’d appreciate more detail than that, Spider.”

“That’s life, sweetie,” Annabelle says with a wry grin.

 _Stall_ , Sasha thinks. He wants to find out what she knows; letting on part of what she knows might keep his attention on this room.

“You serve a different power to Elias, don’t you?” Sasha asks. “The… Web? The fear governing manipulation?”

“The Mother of Puppets,” Annabelle says, curtseying a little. “Not just manipulation by another, but also manipulation by the self: addiction, compulsion, the times a person acts at odd with what their conscious self would choose and can’t quite explain why they’d be so self destructive. All of those are strands in the same tapestry. But is it really service I offer, or just the shape my life is?”

“I’m getting the sense not many people can tell the difference, when they get mixed up with one of these powers.”

“But they are making those choices nonetheless.”

“Ms. Cane.” Elias says, pulling himself to his feet. “If you’ll excuse me.”

Sasha stands up. Part of her wants to move between him and the door, stop him making his way down through the archives. The icy planning part of her doesn’t want to tip her hand yet that there is an emergency.

“Don’t be silly Elias, you know I’d be watching either way. Are you really so keen to deny me a ringside seat? Do you _really_ think it’ll matter make a difference if I’m there or not?”

Elias glares at her and then turns on his heel and steps towards the door. Sasha takes a step to put herself in his way, but he makes an impatient gesture at her and immediately she feels trapped again, backed against a wall by Jude Perry, knowing that with every second that monster’s fingers are scorching through her flesh to her bones.

She staggers back, barely registering his footsteps as he leaves.

And then she hears a tap, tap, tap. It takes Sasha a second to register that it’s Annabelle Cain’s chunky wooden platform shoes getting closer; a second more of confusion to understand she’d stumbled to the ground, and that Cain is crouching down to look her in the eye.

She makes a tsk sound, but it sounds more like a performance than any real disappointment.

“It’ll take more than that to pull the wool over his eyes, little one. I imagine he’ll be learning your plan from that scared little assistant right about now.”

“He wouldn’t have guessed there was a plan to start with if you didn’t show up,” Sasha growls, getting up. “Why give it away?”

“Wouldn’t he? Well, no time to waste, hop along now and face the man playing your master down.”

Sasha has never made it down to the archives as fast in her life. She’s aware of Annabelle Cain’s more measured footsteps behind her, but only barely over the sound of her own pulse and her attempt to steady her breathing. The main archive room is empty, she opens the door to her own office to see Martin holding a fire extinguisher like a baseball bat, visibly shaking, face as white as chalk. Elias has his back to her, but he turns to face her and looks – outright furious.

It’s the most honest expression she’s ever seen on his stolen face. He’s holding something she doesn’t realise is a gun until he turns around at the sound of the door opening.

“Cain!”

But Annabelle Cain is no longer with with Sasha.

“Where’s the spider, Archivist? And do _not_ think you want to stand in my way. I’ve been willing to wait to figure out your game for now, if you force my hand, you’re not too hard a loss to recover from.”

She should be scared – he’s pointing a gun at her – but Martin’s having enough feelings for the two of them so she’s able to shelve all her own sense of panic in order to take attention off him. So instead she notices: there’s fear under his ruthlessness, urgency. Their plan could work.

She screws up all her impatience and all her hunger for answers and demands: “What exactly is it you’re afraid of?”

He hisses at her through his teeth. “What a time for you to hone that skill. Fine, walk with me and I’ll answer.”

He looks past Martin to the trapdoor. Sasha looks back at the archives entrance for Annabelle, but she’s still out of sight. Elias aims the gun at Martin and gestures for him to open the entrance to the tunnels, and then keeps speaking as if Martin’s compliance is not even in question.

“What I’m afraid of is this: there should not be nobody alive in the world with the knowledge of how to kill me and the skill to get there. It took Gertrude a decade to find out enough to an attempt, and that was after years stopping rituals. But the spider has woven some truly elaborate trap, or at least convinced your assistant she has. Is there really a future where _I won?_ ”

Martin glances between Sasha and the door. Sasha can’t see any real way to refuse, so she nods, and he opens the door.

“I don’t think you realise what that means, Sasha. We can _do it._ We can remake the world. You have a few too many scruples and not quite enough at stake in this game, but your replacement… They won’t get that warning. As long as that fool Leitner can be prevented.”

He gestures Sasha into the tunnels with his head, then Martin, then follows them.

“What do you want, from that future?” Sasha asks. She isn’t sure if talking is slowing him down, but it’s information. It can’t hurt, and maybe Martin can get him with the fire extinguisher.

It’s got to been ten minutes by now. Maybe things have gone wrong in the panopticon.

Elias doesn’t answer, this time, just takes out a piece of neatly cut paper with very small printed text on it, takes his eyes off Martin for a brief second or two to silently look over it. Then he folds it back up and hurries them through the tunnels as the paths ahead seem to open for him.

They reach the place too quickly. It is not a room that would not seem all that dramatic above ground, the size of a moderately large lecture hall or conference venue more than a cathedral. But down here after adapting to the narrow tunnels and the clammy underground, the high ceilings and walls lined with cells seem huge.

The cells are all empty. There is a tower in the centre of the room: heavy cast-iron and imposing, looming, with a long ladder up the side of it.

At the top of the ladder, she can see the future Martin’s many-pocketed coat and shaggy blond hair; half way up, she can see Tim.

And as Sasha glances around she sees another person leant against the wall a few foot to the side. Jurgen Leitner, eyes closed and head in his hands, a book by his side. Elias ignores him and strides forward, taking his attention off his hostages. As he stares up at the other Martin, he makes a soft little sound – “ _ah._ ”

Whatever he’s seen, Sasha does not want him to have any chance at all to act on it. She looks around for anything to use as a weapon and comes up empty. So she just charges, jumping at Elias’s back and bearing him down to the ground. He falls, but fires twice up at the tower as he does.

Sasha slams his head into the ground, desperate and panicked. He drops the gun and turns towards her, and she’s –

– _walking, always walking, endlessly. Through a battlefield. Through a villain of furtive plague and witch-hunts. Above ground but unable to escape the thrashing and panic of the humans burrowing like worms below. Past a twisted circus and through its master. Into a burning building. Through the roads of the dead. Alone in the halls of an impersonal mansion. Into a play. Around a twisted garden, unable to look away from its victims. Through perpetual night, then through fields trampled by giants. Through the woods where predators lurk. Always walking towards the Eye –_

Her hold on Elias slackens, and she’s –

– _she’s_ _holding a few typed pieces of paper,_ _still in shock,_ _struggling to take_ _in_ _any of the words through_ _her_ _horr_ _or_ _,_ _hatred, fury_ _: ‘_ _Why_ _does_ _a man seek to destroy the world? It’s a simple enough answer: for immortality and power’_ –

She’s Martin living through the end of the world, and at the same time she’s herself, curiosity cracking the earth of Sasha’s reserve and humour to reach out and ask why and how.

“Well.” Elias says. “This _will_ be an interesting experiment.”

And she’s –

– _she’s_ _M_ _artin, but reading words on a page,_ _and_ _she’s_ _swept up in_ _Jonah’_ _s_ _intention_ _, triumphant and gleeful and determined, and she’s the Archivist, who cannot resist information_ _._

One hand still clenched around the back of her boss’s neck, Sasha James starts speaking: _“_ _You who watch and know and understand none. You who listen and hear and will not comprehend. You who wait and wait and drink in all that is not yours by right._ **_**Come to us-** _ ** **_._ ** **”**

And up in the panopticon’s tower, Martin’s axe comes down on Jonah Magnus’s neck.

The memory of the written intent Sasha was swept up in stops abruptly, like river crashing against a dam wall. She couldn’t have said what she was seeing a second ago, but now she’s seeing Elias’ s body, gone limp in her grasp.

Behind them , Annabelle Cain claps once, twice, three times, then there’s just the sound of her footsteps heading away into the dark.

Sasha tries to stand up to follow her , but something’s wrong; she’ s light-headed and her vision fills with stars like dead pixels. She can see her timeline’s version of Martin lifting a hand to his head like he feels it too.

* * *

Martin climbs down the tower. Tim must have fallen from half-way up when Elias died; Martin makes his best attempt at putting him in the recovery position.

Leitner is looking over at the other two of this world’s archival staff , looking to see they have a pulse. Martin should probably have done that for Tim. But to be honest, he’s afraid to find out the answer.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help, young man.” Leitner said. “There was a lady watching from the doorway, but she seems to have moved on now.”

“Annabelle Cain.” Martin says. “ Will they recover?”

“ A bit too late to start worrying about that, isn’t it? ”

“ Elias needed to die either way. I’ m not _happy_ about it, but, Sasha and Tim were already dead in my timeline. ”

“… So it’s fine to kill them here? Little did they know, you’re Gertrude’s true successor.”

“I’m sorry, _how_ many assistants did you run through before you let everything in your library out to terrorise the world?”

Leitner shakes his head: “I’ve _said_ I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”

“And I made a horrible bet. That they’d wake up, or that if they didn’t, it’s still be better than a world with a clock ticking down until Jonah Magnus found the right the to end it.”

Sasha is still breathing. The other Martin is still breathing, looking a decade younger than Martin thinks of himself. Tim’s left arm and leg both seem broken, but better to land on those than his spine or skull.

Annabelle Cain knows something, and that’s never safe. There is hopefully still an Archivist, without anyone to guide her, years less intertwined with the Institute than his timeline had been by the end. The assistants should wake up and be freed .

And somewhere above, Jonathan Sims is alive and unhurt. Martin can’t picture what it’d be like to knock on his door one day and introduce himself – ‘Hi, I’m your boyfriend from the reality where you trekked around a dead world writing the universe’s most horrifying tourist guide, I’m gonna be baffled every time I remember you’re just a cute middle class twit here’?

The world is closer to safe now, he thinks. That’s not nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, AU Archives gang, I'm leaving it ambiguous whether you'll ever wake up.
> 
> (Does Annabelle Cain have a grand plan here, or is she just being nosy because she saw future Martin stumble through Hilltop Road and wants to know what his deal is? WHO COULD SAY. If I were a super sneaky spider avatar I certainly wouldn't let on when I was missing information...)


End file.
